The use and availability of media content (such as audio, video, and pictorial data) is growing rapidly with the increasing popularity of digital media coupled with the relatively low cost of personal computer hardware, other media playing devices, and/or other media services. The advent of “media” centric PCs and software for such devices, such as Windows XP Media Center Edition (available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.) has further fueled this growth. Therefore, it now is quite common for users to have large amounts of media content stored digitally on their PCs and/or spread around over multiple media content sources (e.g., multiple devices in the home, office, etc.). Stored media content typically is played on the primary host PC or computer, streamed to playback devices on a local network, “pushed”/copied from the primary PC or other source to a dedicated media device (such as an MP3 player, a Portable Media Center device, or the like), and/or “pushed”/copied to a media-capable mobile PC (such as a laptop, notebook, or tablet PC).
The popularity of portable media devices provides a clear indication that many users want to carry their media library (or at least a subset of it) with them in a portable manner. For various reasons, as noted above, the primary mechanism available for moving media content onto portable media devices, like those described above, is via the “push” model, which works in a 1 to 1 relationship between the host or source with the desired media content (e.g., a “media library”) and each portable device onto which media content is pushed.
While the above arrangements can move media content to portable devices, there are some disadvantages to these procedures. For example, in order to “push” the media content to the portable device, users typically have to connect the portable device to the media content source, and the copying actions have to be initiated and performed via the media content source. This can be inconvenient, particularly if media content from several potential media content sources is desired (e.g., from one or more PCs, set top boxes, digital audio or video play/storage systems, etc.), because the user is required to move the portable device to the separate locations of the different sources, separately connect the portable device to these sources, locate the desired media content data, and push/copy it to the portable device. Moreover, if the user is not certain which source contains the desired media content to be included on the portable device, he/she would be forced to move from source to source, separately searching each one, until the desired media content was located.